For an IP-based television system, a television remote control may be the only input device by which a user can interact with the IPTV system. Television remote controls can be difficult to use as text input devices, particularly due to the limited set of input keys that are available on such devices. For example, other than the various configuration and television-specific input keys, a television remote control may only have a standard numeric or alphanumeric input keypad that includes the numbers zero through nine to input a channel selection.
Various applications that may be available via a user's television system content provider, or that are otherwise accessible via an IPTV system, typically require a user to enter a text-based password that is displayed on a user interface. As a password is entered by a user, asterisks are usually displayed on the user interface to mask the characters of the password for confidentiality, such as in a television room where several people may be able to view a password that a user enters to access an application.
A conventional alphanumeric input keypad on a television remote control includes the numbers zero through nine along with the alphabetic characters “A” to “Z”. Although zero (0) through nine (9) is a total of ten input keys, an alphanumeric or numeric input keypad is commonly referred to as a “9-key” keypad. The letters on a “9-key” keypad are distributed along with the numbers two (2) through nine (9). For example, the number two (2) includes the letters “A”, “B”, and “C”, the number three (3) includes the letters “D”, “E”, and “F”, and so on with each consecutive number being associated with the next consecutive three letters. The letters “Q” and “Z” may not be included on some keypads, but if they are, the number seven (7) has four associated letters to include “Q” and the number nine (9) has four associated letters to include “Z”.
Techniques are available to enter text with an alphanumeric “9-key” keypad, however they are difficult to enter text. When a user enters the text characters of a password, the user only sees an asterisk (“*”)on the user interface display for each character of the password as it is entered. The techniques to enter text and/or letters with a “9-key” keypad include multi-tapping (also referred to as “triple-tap”) and triple-tap-extended which are commonly used with cell phones to create text messages. As described above, the letters “A”, “B”, and “C” are associated with the number two (2) input key on the keypad for triple-tap text entry. Pressing the input key once enters an “A”, twice enters a “B”, three times enters a “C”, and four times enters a “2”. For triple-tap-extended, multiple characters are mapped to the number two (2) input key on a keypad, such as “A”, “B”, “C”, “a”, “b”, “c”, “2”, and the “@” symbol. Multiple characters are similarly mapped to the additional numeric input keys zero (0) through nine (9) on an alphanumeric “9-key” keypad for triple-tap-extended text entry.
Spelling out even a short password can require multiple key entries. For example, to spell out “CAB” with triple-tap, a user would have to press the number two (2) input key a total of six times—three more inputs than would be necessary with a conventional keyboard. While entering a password that includes a long character sequence with a television remote control, a user can become confused by the multiple keypad entries for each character when only asterisks are displayed on the user interface.